Compiler-based code compression for hard real-time systems

Abstract

Real-Time Systems often come with additional requirements apart from being functionally correct and adhering to their timing constraints. Another common additional optimization goal is to meet code size requirements. Code compression techniques might be utilized to meet code size constraints in embedded systems. We show how to extend a compiler targeting hard real-time systems by an asymmetric compiler-based code compression/decompression, where the compression is performed at the compilation time and the decompression takes place at the execution time. Moreover, experimental results show the impact of the decompression algorithm on the estimated Worst-Case Execution Time that is one of the key properties of hard real-time systems.